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Motion Design

Remember life before your smartphone, tablet, and social media? Yeah I know, it’s kind of hard to imagine not being constantly connected anymore. The video below from Max Stossel & Sander van Dijk is a poetic send up about how we have all become addicted to that piece of tech sitting in your hand right now, or waiting to be retrieved from your pocket as soon as you put down whatever tech you are looking at now.

The video itself is great. A nice live action short with really well thought out graphics that have been motion tracked to specific source points in the frame. Solid editing and post work really help to polish this, but the real meat is in the message. A message with a direct call to action at the timewellspent.io website. The blurb before the video pretty much sums up what they are about.

Change incentives so media competes to improve our lives, not get eyeballs.

Invent new interfaces that help us to make room for what matters.

A poetic short film by Max Stossel & Sander van Dijk:

In the Attention Economy, technology and media are designed to maximize our screen-time. But what if they were designed to help us live by our values? timewellspent.io

What if news & media companies were creating content that enriched our lives, vs. catering to our most base instincts for clicks?What if social platforms were designed to help us create our ideal social lives, instead of to maximize time-on site and “likes”?What if dating apps measured their success in how well they helped us find what we’re looking for instead of in # of swipes?

As technology gets more and more engaging, and as AI and VR become more and more prevalent in our day-to-day lives we need to take a look at how we’re structuring our future.

Time Well Spent is a movement to align technology with our humanity: timewellspent.io

In the world of film production and CG effects, there is a separate world of motion designers that craft user interfaces for on screen displays. They are a unique group of individuals that craft high-tech, or LoFi looks for the film industry from scratch. What they uild has to be unique, creative, convincing, and blend with the overall look and feel of the film. In many ways, these teams are creating another character for the actors to interact with. When it’s done right, it can be absolutely mesmerizing. This work is complex, involved, highly detailed, and time consuming to produce.

For Guardians of the Galaxy, Territory Studios produced a multitude of screens for the entire movie. They developed everything from dancing particle systems, to unique type faces that are used in the on-screen displays. Below is a sampling of some of the unique UI systems they created, along with a show reel of the total. The link above takes you to Territories site, where there are a number of still frames that really highlight the quality of the work they did for this movie.

Over the last two decades, the quality of desktop created 3D animation and CGI work has grown by leaps and bounds. The animation below was created by the Mill for D&AD’s opening title sequence. It was built in Cinema 4D, utilizing physics simulation and manual animation methods to achieve the working components of the rube Goldberg Machines. Not only was it created using desktop software, it was done with a small crew of animators and editors, which is another tribute to just how far computer generated design has come in the last couple of decades. This is really nice work with solid editing, sound s=design and animated sequences tying it all together. For full details on the process of how this was made, click the link above.

LAIKA/house and a crew of more than 60 created “History in a Bottle”, the sixty second spot below for Jose Cuervo Tradicional. Working with McCann New York they have created a bit of magic here. I say magic, because when you watch the spot you have no idea just how much work went into the final production. That is why I included all the behind the scenes footage as well as the making of video below it.The production on this spot is truly epic, and it is the definition of “you get what you pay for”. More often than not, when working on any kind of video you are asked to create something spectacular with a less than spectacular budget. LAIKA/house pulled out all the stops on this and it shows. Hat tip to Jose Cuervo for going big budget and hat tip to LAIKA/house for such amazing production value in the finished spot.

This is a fun way to start your week. A nice little student piece from Savannah College of Art and Design student Chelsea Jones. It combines dance, animation, post production, and most of all flawless timing to execute. There are two videos below. The first is the finished piece, the second is the making of. Chelsea doesn’t say how long she practiced until she got the timing perfect, but I have a feeling it was quite a while. The final result was worth all the effort.

Most car ads, like beer ads get lost in a sea of white noise. Each ad points out pretty much the same thing, in typical fashion with out much originality or creativity. I think that is why this new spot for Honda really sticks out. It is a clever and creative approach to your typical car ad. It’s fun, inventive, holds your attention, and most of all leaves the brand name imprinted in your mind long after it has stopped. Blending some great CGI work with live action and killer sound design, Honda has launched a winner with this ad for the new Civic Tourer. Both the finished piece and the making of video are below.

in two days Pause Fest kicks off in Melbourne Australia.The festival is focused on interactive, motion, art, music and design running for 3 days and nights. I wish I was going so I could escape the insanely cold weather here in the midwest, but alas I am not. That doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy a bit of the Pause Fest magic as showcased in the animation below.

Váscolo had the privilege of creating the indent for this year’s Pause Fest. Working with a number of designers and animators Váscolo landed on the idea of combining communication devices from different eras that would be mixed through various scenes and situations. The result is pretty nice with great flow, and timing. Now if you have ever wondered just how complex something like this can be, watch the second video below from Molten which shows the making of just one small sequence in the completed animation.